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CHAPTER VI.

I was beginning to get over the phase of nervous inaction which resulted from my unpleasant interview with the burglar, and to feel that I was once more mentally and physically ready for work, when Mr. Leighton wrote for me to come to the office, and told me that he was anxious to send a consignment of pearls on approval to a large firm in Bristol, and that, if I liked to undertake the business, he would be pleased to place it in my hands. He did not apprehend any danger, since it was not even remotely probable that anyone would know either of my journey or its object; and he should like me to he his emissary, because these would be his first dealings with the firm, and to establish a friendly footing between them was very desirable from a business point of view.

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I gladly undertook the commission, and made preparations for my journey without any misgivings.

I had never been to Bristol, though I had often received invitations to pay it a visit from relations of my mother who lived there, and I decided that, now fate had brought me the opportunity, I would take full advantage of it, and, my business once finished, and the pearls safely transferred from my keeping, would roam about for a time and give myself a holiday.

I was in such high spirits all the day before that fixed for my departure, that some friends who were calling on me rallied me on my cheerfulness, and one of them, as she said good-bye, laughingly asked me if I had just had a fortune left me.

"I have never seen you so gay, Mrs. Delamere," she said, "what is the reason of it? Do tell me."

"There is no special reason," I answered; "I am going out of town to-morrow, and am rather looking forward to it. I don't know that I have any other cause for rejoicing."

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She looked at me attentively. She was a Scotch girl, a Miss Burnley, and very superstitious. "Then you are 'fey,'" she said, "that's what it is, and something is going to happen to you."

"What sort of something?" I asked; "and why do you think so?"

"I know it," she said; "when a person is unreasonably happy and excited, the Scotch call them 'fey,' and say it means coming danger. Have you had any unusual experience lately--during the last twenty-four hours, say?"

I pretended to reflect. She was quite in earnest, and I am not superstitious.

"The only one I can remember is that a man stared at me very rudely yesterday," I said at last, "and wrote something down in a book about me; at least it seemed to me as if he did so."

She looked quite startled.

"If you see that man again," she entreated, "avoid him! No matter how difficult it may be, go away from him. He is your evil genius."

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"Good gracious!" I said, "how alarming. Do you know, I believe he was only a surveyor taking measurements."

"Never mind," she replied, as she went away, "don't let him come near you if you can help it. He means danger."

I was a great deal too busy to think of her warning again, and too intent on so disposing of the pearls in various much-concealed pockets in my attire that they should be safe. I carried a handbag with me--one of the ordinary dressing-cases of travel--but I never placed anything very valuable in it, reserving it for small accessories of comfort.

I had sent it to Mappin's for a little necessary repair, and had fetched it away during my drive that day, on the occasion when the trifling incident of which I spoke to Miss Burnley had occurred.

The man, a respectable-looking loafer, had sauntered past my carriage twice, and had stared in rather a marked manner; finally, after jotting down something in a note-book, had lounged away.

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I was going by the morning train to Bristol, which meant an early start, and I had intended to be in good time, and to choose my carriage carefully, but various small obstacles cropped up, and made me so late that I only reached the platform at the moment of the train's departure.

The guard hurried me on, and opening the door of a first-class carriage, signed impatiently for me to enter.

I saw that it was empty, and gave a hesitating glance to the window of the next carriage.

A man and a woman were sitting opposite to each other; the woman was facing me, and even in my momentary glimpse I saw that she was young, fair, well-dressed; the man had his back towards me, and I caught only his profile.

But that was enough. It recalled, with a flash of memory that included Miss Burnley's warning, "he means danger," the face of the man who had stared at me.

Instinctively I turned and entered the empty carriage.

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I had intended to find a compartment with three or four fellow-travellers; the train was an express, and went right through to Bristol; therefore, if I started well there was nothing to fear.

But after all, to be alone was safer than travelling with only one other person.

I wondered idly whether the resemblance between the man in the carriage beyond, and the impertinent loafer, was a real one or only fancied, concluded that in any case it could not matter, and gave myself over wholly to the charms of a new novel.

We were nearing the end of our journey, and had just entered the Box Tunnel, when I was startled back from romance to reality by a short, sharp scream, apparently strangled in the very middle of its utterance, coming from the next carriage, followed by a thud against the partition behind me.

I sprang to my feet and listened intently; the beating of my heart quickened with sudden unrealised terror.

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No sound for an instant, then another cry, a low sobbing one, ending in a horrible choking gasp.

I flew to the alarm and pressed it, while all sorts of vague thoughts rushed through my brain. What was happening to the woman next door?--for it was a woman's voice. Was she being murdered? Was the man a thief--an escaped lunatic? Miss Burnley's warning, "he means danger," ran like a dark thread in and out of my brain.

We were nearly through the tunnel; the train, which had slackened speed half way before I sounded the alarm, was now slowing down. Glimpses of daylight came from the opening ahead of us.

I leant out of my window, debating whether I should open the door and step along to the next or not, and as the thought occurred to me I saw the guard swiftly emerge from his van and come towards me.

Then the door of the next carriage opened, and a white, furtive face looked for an instant into mine, while the man swung himself | | 99 down, and fled through the tunnel into the darkness which we had just left.

I tried to scream, but my voice would not sound right.

The guard, however, saw the man descend and run, and, springing down, followed him, shouting out to the guard at the other end.

By this time every window was alive with eager curious faces, and voices clamouring to know the reason of our sudden stop. I stepped out on the footboard, and into the next carriage.

Horror! a woman was lying on the floor, her distorted purple face bruised and bleeding, her eyes staring upwards in mute and desperate appeal.

The lace ruffle round her neck, at which one of her hands were clutching convulsively, had been twisted and strained with such force, that it looked like a narrow ragged string on either side of which the flesh rose in two dark ridges.

I thought she was dead, but I threw myself down on my knees, and cutting the edge of the ruffle with my pocket-knife, was able to get a finger under it, and to untwist it.

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By this time one of the guards was with me, and we lifted the poor thing on to the seat, and supporting her head, I gently wiped the swollen lips, round which a foam had gathered, and stooping, held my ear against her heart.

It seemed to me that a slow, heavy beat was faintly perceptible, and when the next moment someone came with a flask of brandy, I forced the discoloured lips and clenched teeth apart, and poured some down her throat.

There was a quiver of the eyelids, they closed, a tremor ran through her whole frame, and a sobbing sigh came, as she swallowed the brandy.

"I am a doctor; will you allow me?" said a man entering.

We made way for him gladly, and, during the half-hour that passed before we ran into Bristol Station, he and I, under his directions, gradually restored the sufferer to consciousness.

"You are alighting here?" he said interrogatively, as we began to stop.

"Yes," I said.

"I should advise your taking her at once to the nearest friend's house," he continued in a | | 101 low voice, "or a hotel; she should be kept perfectly quiet. She is your sister, I suppose."

I gave an astonished negative.

"She is no relation; I do not even know her."

He looked mystified.

"But," he said, "I thought, of course, she was with you and she is so like you."

I looked at the face, the poor disfigured face it certainly, except for the accidental alteration of it, might have been very like mine.

She was, too, evidently about the same height, and was dressed in black with touches of white as I was.

I began to tell him hurriedly the circumstances of the case, and then the train stopped, and we were surrounded at once by officials, with the stationmaster at their head.

I related exactly what had happened, and my story of the man who descended from the train and escaped through the tunnel was corroborated by the guard.

The man who had succeeded in escaping, he said, must have dived between the carriages to | | 102 the other side of the train and got out of the tunnel on the further side; the train had to proceed, and they had wasted several minutes as it was trying to catch him.

The poor woman was, after the attack, far too weak and ill to answer any questions; she glanced about as if in search of something, and on the guard producing a handbag which he found in the tunnel, and which must have been dropped by her assailant in his flight, she made a feeble sign of direction for us to open it.

We found a card-case inside, which revealed her name and address, and she was carried to a fly, and driven to Grove Villa, Clifton, accompanied by a detective, the doctor, and myself.

It appeared that she was the wife of a lawyer, Westall by name, and that she had been paying a visit to her own people in town and was on her way home.

Her husband, for whom we sent at once to his office, was absolutely at a loss to account for the murderous attack on his wife, and could | | 103 only suggest that the man must have been mad.

For three days Mrs. Westall was so ill that it was hopeless to attempt to find out anything from her; and, indeed, the doctors were afraid that she would succumb to the nervous shock; but she pulled through, to my great joy. For not only was I deeply interested in her recovery from ordinary feelings of compassion and kindliness, but I had a vague indescribable feeling of participation in this mysterious crime as though I were in some way, unknown to myself, involved in its guilt.

The face of the man in the tunnel haunted me. It was most certainly the same as that of the loafer who had stared at me.

I felt sure that in some inexplicable fashion I was mixed up with his attempt on Mrs. Westall's life.

At last she rallied sufficiently for the doctors to sanction a legal interview with her, the result of which I learnt as soon as possible.

It appeared that when she first got into the train at Paddington, there was another lady in | | 104 it, but that a minute or two before starting a man passed up and down in front of the carriage, and apparently stared rudely at this lady, who, on his preparing to enter, murmured an expression of annoyance, and got out, changing to another carriage higher up.

Mrs. Westall, a little startled, thought of following; but seeing that the man appeared harmless, and at once engrossed himself in a newspaper, decided not to. He was perfectly nice on the way down; spoke to her once or twice with reference to the window, and other trivialities, and she felt no alarm at all.

On entering the Box Tunnel, however, he suddenly got up, and was about to lift down her bag, which was in the rack above her, when she stopped him.

"Excuse me, that is mine," she said.

"It's going to be mine, now," he said. "I know what you have got in it, well enough, and you will have to do without this little lot of pearls."

He pushed her aside and made for the door. But knowing that all her money, her ticket, | | 105 and a few jewels were in the bag, she would not take its loss so calmly.

She grappled with him, and succeeded in wresting the bag from his grasp and throwing it behind her.

He tried to reach it, but failing to do so, threw her down, and told her he would "do" for her, and have the bag all the same.

She struggled desperately for a moment, and then he got his hand into the ruffle at her neck, and twisted it until she lost consciousness.

She remembered nothing more till her restoration.

"Either he was a madman," she said, in her deposition, "or he must have taken me for someone else."

Alas! poor thing; I saw only too plainly that she had been mistaken for someone else, and in my horror at this confirmation of my undefined dread, I nearly betrayed myself.

But I felt that it would be unwise and a mistake, both for my own sake and my employer's, that this should be known publicly, and as soon as I had finished my commission | | 106 at Bristol, sold the pearls, and ascertained that Mrs. Westall's recovery though slow was sure, I hurried back to town and told Mr. Leighton the whole story.

He commended my discretion.

Since the man had escaped, and was still in ignorance as to his own mistake, there was no object to be gained in our explaining it to the public.

From my description of him, Mr. Leighton felt quite sure that he was a discharged employé of his, who had doubtless been lurking about the office, had guessed my business there, and, possibly, overheard my arrangements with Mr. Leighton.

He had recognised me when I was waiting at Mappin's for my bag, had concluded that I intended to convey the pearls in it, and, jotting down a few notes as to my dress and general appearance, had laid his plan to rob me on the way down.

Mrs. Westall's unfortunate--for her--chance resemblance to me in all these details, and choice of the same train, coupled with my own | | 107 very late arrival at Paddington, had misled him, and had ended in her being my involuntary substitute.

"He must certainly have thought I was someone else," she said constantly, "because he spoke more than once of 'the pearls.' 'I'll have those pearls,' were the last words I heard him say, 'if I swing for it'--or else he was quite mad."

But both Mr. Leighton and I feel convinced that there was method in his madness, and that I was saved marvellously from a struggle, which might possibly in my case have ended fatally.

Indeed it must have done so in hers, had I not sounded the alarm, and so interrupted the murderer, and saved her life.

I am most inexpressibly thankful that it turned out so; for I could never have forgiven myself otherwise.

It is one thing to risk one's own life, when one's living depends on it, but quite another thing to involve others, however accidentally, in danger.

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Mr. Leighton was inclined, for my own safety, to give me my dismissal; but I persauded [sic] him at last to reconsider it, and promised to be very careful, and to have no more adventures if possible.